Pirate Bay Co-Founder Envisions Peer-to-Peer DNS System

Pirate Bay co-founder has other things on his mind than jail time and multi-million dollar fines. Rather than worry about such trivial matters, Sunde has taken to championing a new, uncensored Internet, one that takes the general concept of BitTorrent and applys it to Domain Name System (DNS) lookups.

"By using existing technology for de-centralization together with already having a crew with skilled programmers, communicators, and network specialists, an alternative system is not far away," Sunde wrote in a blog. "We're not going to re-invent the wheel, we're going to build an existing technology as much as possible."

The way it works now, DNS is tasked with translating a site name, like maximumpc.com, with a string of numbers that represent the domain's actual address on the Web, one that computers can read. You can think of it as a telephone number, and ICANN holds the phone book via over a dozen PCs called "Root Servers." These servers contain the IP addresses of all the Top Level Domains (TLDs).

What Sunde wants to do is set up a P2P DNS system to take the place of these centralized root servers, the upshot being it would then be impossible for government agencies to block sites from being looked up.